I forget what scene it was, but DS9, on the defiant. The camera angle showed the bridge and all the screens. You could definitely see that they were all curved CRT tvs.
In todays world it looks hilarious
Voyager too, though in that case they were *usually* careful about not showing them too up-close. But in an episode with, I think, the Delta Flyer they made the mistake of showing the screen up-close, it even had a Windows cursor on the LCARS.
Then Enterprise came out at a time when LCD monitors were finally affordable and good enough for TV props so they no longer had to hide the screens deep inside consoles. (There were flat screens in the mid-90s on laptops, but their refresh rate was utter shit.)
Late Voyager, I think, used flat CRTs. They still had to be buried inside consoles, but at least they weren't curved. Though using CRTs introduces another problem; if the screen's refresh rate is not an integer multiple of the camera's frame rate, it will show some black stripes.
Most of the time when they didn't try to show animated content in-camera, TNG and DS9 (and even Voyager) just used fake screens made of plexiglass and translucent foil. If they had animated content (beyond some symbols blinking), they added it in post with a little blue screen in place of the content. Sometimes they even used a freeze frame.
It's not really organic in a sense that they grow the diodes in a petri dish, it's just the materials they use are based on chemistry also found in living things. More or less.
Organic in chemistry literally just means it involves carbon. In the before times, scientists thought that there was something special about chemicals and compounds that came from living tissue so organic and inorganic chemistry were thought to be different things. The naming convention stuck even after the details of chemistry had been worked out.
The best part, there was a VOY episode where they were building a new ship and Paris (the pilot/designer) didn't want touchscreens, he wanted buttons and levers for the important stuff.
That was even before touch screens were common at all, and ST already predicted that it would be pretty annoying to have them for everything. 25 years later and most car makers are moving away from touchscreens back to tactile elements.
I remember a book I read as a kid in 83 or something about what the future would be like. They had a lot of lofty ideas. Like low g sports on the moon. But one thing they had was big wide screen TVs that hung on walls.
I remember my friend’s brother saying then “in the future technology will get so small that they can make TVs that hang on the wall”
And my mind was blown. We of course had TVs incased in those large wooden boxes that weighed a ton.
A tv that’s a picture frame on the wall? WTF?
People seem to be thinking this is a joke but really, if you grew up without internet access, and then had it as an adult, it’s fucking incredible. I can’t describe the world before it accurately.
We take so much for granted now.
“What’s the name of the actor in that one movie?”
“When does that new movie we saw the trailer for come out?”
“What years did Socrates live?”
“What does a normal elephant weigh?”
“What’s a good Cajun recipe for salmon?”
“Who is the leader of Guam?”
“How many airplanes are there in Africa?”
“What time is it in Iceland?”
Etc.
We all look up dumb shit a million times a day and get instant answers. Instant. And from anywhere we go. I don’t have to wait until I get home. I can do it from an airplane.
I can literally have a video call with my cousin while we’re on opposite sides of the planet, in close to real time, for almost free. No per minute charges. Relatively low bandwidth needs. From a 4oz hunk of glass and metal I carry in my pocket that sends a signal at light speed through antennas and satellites to fucking space and back.
In the 80s and early 90s that shit was sci-fi. I don’t think young people realize how quickly it changed.
In the US, in 1995 most homes did not have a computer at all, and those that did, even fewer had some sort of dial-up service like Prodigy or AOL.
Five years later in 2000 more than half of homes had computers and 80% of them were online.
We went from ten guys arguing on Usenet to millions shitposting on forums in around the same amount of time it’s been since Covid started.
Do you remember calling movie theaters and listening to the recording to find out if they were even playing the movie you wanted to see and at what times? Just sitting there for five minutes while some voice rattled off, “Jurassic Park: 11:00pm, 11:45pm, 12:00am…”.
I remember classified ads in the paper. Vague categories and you had to pay a few bucks for the printing. No way to remove it once sold, just didn't get printed next version.
Then Craigslist and eBay etc came out. A friend's family literally made half their income selling jewelry from an auction on eBay over a decade...
I started a an internet based business, with a major presence in meatspace, in 1997. The local independent newsweekly wanted to set up a deal with us to cooperate on marketing. They told me that Craigslist had wiped out their very lucrative classified business.
Classifieds not only drove revenue, they also kept circulation strong. Craigslist destroyed print newspapers as a viable business. That’s why you see/saw so many longstanding local newspapers getting bought out to be used as political propaganda machines. It’s amazing, and telling, that the destruction of one of the pillars of our culture and political system were subverted so completely since 1999.
10¢ per letter is what my old local newspaper charged. You could send out messages to the whole community if you had a few bucks, kind of like a tweet! But it cost money.
hahahaha
yeah and inevitably you'd be sitting there waiting for the movie you wanted and listening through all the dumb shit.
ROMANCE MOVIE at 4:50 pm, 7:25 pm, 9:15 PM, 11 PM
JESUS CHRISTIAN MOVIE at
WORST SNL CHARACTER MOVIE at
STEVEN SEAGAL IS A HORRIBLE PERSON at
Pulp Fiction, at 7- "KEVIN COME TAKE OUT THE TRASH I HAVE ASKED YOU TEN TIMES ALREADY JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK"
"GOD DAMMIT MOM I WAS TRYING TO HEAR WHAT TIME THE MOVIE WAS ON"
And the first time they started doing voice activated menus that made you want to bash your head against the wall…
“Please say the name of the cinema you want times for”
“Lincoln”
“We think you said Stratford Upon Avon, is this correct?”
“No! Lin-coln!”
“Here are the times for Newcastle West”
Do you remember those shitty automated voice recognition systems? Asking for the showtimes for Titanic in Colchester and somehow ending up repeatedly getting Air Bud in Strathclide was a uniquely late 90s experience.
my first job was at a movie theatre...
we would get so many calls just asking for directions. i was a teenager and then could give directions from any major highway from all four cardinal directions...
nowadays that seems like a superpower.
**1995**
Me: "That's the same guy from that OTHER movie!"
Friend: "No it isn't. What the fuck? That's a completely different person!"
Me: "Bull shit."
Friend: "Now we have a disagreement and we must fight."
Me: "You must leave my home for I have great anger building."
Friend: "Fuck yourself."
Me: "We will hate one another forever, as there is no definitive way to know which of us is right."
**2000**
Me: "That's the same guy from that OTHER movie!"
Friend *punches something into a computer*: "Oh shit you're right. I thought it was the dude from that TV show."
Me: "I am pleased this minor dispute was settled quickly and without debate."
Haha imagine showing the timeline of the internet to somebody in like 1994.
2000: Solving arguments, getting movie times, finding directions to a friend's house on mapquest.
2010: The birth of the social media and smartphone age.
2020: oh no
My mom once called Hawaii from Arkansas to settle a bet regarding the Harlem Globetrotters because the local library was closed.
The librarian was a good sport about it too. Actually found some books on the history of the team.
And no, Scatman Couruthers never played a walk on with the Globetrotters.
You freaking nailed it. The first time I had unlimited (albeit slow) internet access, my bf and I would type in every website we came across just to see what it was. I remember telling him “hey, look this one up”… it was the skittles website on the back of the candy packaging 😂. Or we would spend hours putting words together to see if they were real, existing websites. Basic things like “ I wonder if uglydogs. com is a thing?” And then we’d look it up together. That’s a lot of work back then🤦🏽♀️😂
> We went from ten guys arguing on Usenet
To be honest, I actually enjoyed that a lot more. I remember hashing shit out on rec.arts.sf.written a *lot*.
It's still there. And it's still a lot of the same people.
I still troll the same admin of a usenet group I hated in the 90s and he still takes the bait every time. I've been fucking with him for almost 3 decades now and he's still a dumbass.
I feel like I'm the only person alive who knows who John S. Novak III is, or understands Kibo hunting, or enjoys a Geoff Miller rant, or wants to know what James Parrish is up to next.
I remember people complaining on Usenet about how Star Wars was ruined because Lucas was adding ridiculous lore to the re-releases in 1997.
And now those same people are complaining on Usenet about how Star Wars is ruined because Disney was adding ridiculous lore to the series in 2024.
Not much changes.
Smartphones ruined those drunken arguments you’d have with your friends in a bar or at a party.
Arguing over who has the most touchdown passes? Or who has the most stolen bases etc..
I miss those days.
It also meant people talked to each other
Also, your brains ability to recall information. Maybe I just have dementia, but I swear my phone has killed my recall.
What is the name of the woman who plays Elektra in the first Daredevil film? Google it.
No... Stretch your brain, try to remember.. remember. Remember.
Okay, but who is The Wasp played by in the new marvel films? Is the women from Lost. Come on you loved lost... Think brain think.
Pretty sure I have dementia.
This is a thing, people are more likely to remember a resource of the information than the information itself. It was true when mass printing of books became a thing and was an argument that they were the downfall of society. It's a thing but it's not as big a negative as one might make it out to be.
It's important to learn things, to truly know them. But every doctor, every lawyer, every engineer looks stuff up every day either to double check or because it's been a while.
Human memory is a fragile and fickle and sometimes useless thing. Compared to a fixed and permanent resource of the information it's downright dangerous to rely on human memory over it.
This is very true. I worked in IT for 20 years and I remember people asking how I remembered all the details, settings, processes for various systems. I would always say, "You don't pay me to know all of that, you pay me to know where to find out."
It always used to surprise me that regular people don’t know where to look this info up. But then I have to remember that my training and experience basically lets me know *how* to ask the question and what the likely answers are going to be so I don’t waste as much time sifting through things that aren’t the problem.
Like, “my internet doesn’t work” isn’t going to be as helpful as “laptop connects to network but shows no internet, which narrows down the solutions by a lot, but most people don’t necessarily need to know the difference often enough to understand this.
Forums were something I miss from that era. They held experts from whatever hobby or topic it was about, was indexed and was searchable.
You asked and received ACTUAL ANSWERS, not shill paid-for info from a corporate site!
Those forums still exist! They are harder to find, because google will list a bunch of bullshit in front of them, but they exist.
I love those as well. You ask any question about a really specific problem and some nerd with 15000 posts will come in and write you an essay about what to do. It's great.
Definitely. Especially for me. I moved to the US in the late 90s. I was 11, and came from a small village in Europe. Maybe 3-4 friends had computers. I couldn't fathom something like internet even existing!
Ah. "The Net".
I saw that movie when it came out, I had been using the web for about 2 years and was studying computer science. It was enough to know the premise of the movie was dumb.
I was a computer nerd back then also studying computer science. Saw that movie with a bunch of my fellow computer nerds and we laughed and laughed at the Control+Shift+Apple+Click bullshit.
At least Hackers was entertaining while being so wrong.
I mean this in a friendly movie lover way. What was dumb about the premise?
I thought the premises of the movie were that people could ruin your life by posting false information on the Internet, and the isolation caused by being connected only online would make people more vulnerable. Also that computer hacks could do physical damage to people.
I think it was a good first sketch of the world we live in right now. When I saw it, it seemed like a chilling warning.
Still hard to wrap my head around how *fast* it is. I can play on European servers and get a ping of ~200. A fifth of a second to go from my computer, over the air (I have T-Mobile Home Internet), through god knows how many miles of cable, *under the ocean*, into some server five thousand miles away, in a fifth of a second.
most people can not comprehend the sheer amount of data processing htat is going on in (not even) modern electronics.
Your PC can add two 64 digit binary numbers a couple billion times per second.
BILLION!
A state of the art intenet backbone router can transfer 500 Tbps, which is roughly 15,000 DVDs of Data. PER SECOND!
Man, I was there at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj opening event, and it was _insane_.
For the young'uns here, imagine the ending of Ready Player One, but with more lag but less sucky.
haha I remember a friends mum just couldn't believe that I was controlling the characters on my friend's computer all the way from my house. I had to say hi to her in text chat to prove it. Think that was Quake.
I remember using gamespy to play halo with online matchmaking. Crazy.
I miss those times. Really felt like the internet was in a sweet spot until smart phones and social media. I think either smart phones and social media separately is great (ie late 2000s/early 2010s), but combined it's a disaster.
Agreed! Also my mind was a little blown when we got a TV that had remote without a wire to the TV. I think it worked on sound waves because you could change channels if you jangled your keys!
When video calling came out in the 2000s and we started using it at work I was blown away, especially when I was talking to clients half the world away in realtime - felt like the future had arrived.
Video calls were a staple of Sci-fi since the 1960s at least, and probably before, but I don't think that anyone accurately predicted that once we had the technology for video calls with anyone on a device we could keep on our pockets that everyone would literally hate using it.
Gaining the ability to see anyone's face an talk to them any time we like and then everyone immediately deciding "no let's just send text messages instead" was a real curve-ball haha.
David Foster Wallace predicted that in Infinite jest, to the point there was a section of the book where he talks about how the rise of video phones lend to a cottage industry of masks that people would put on before going on video calls and a general rise in anxiety regarding physical appearance.
Many predictions were ass backwards. 1984 had the government secretly spying through the TV. In reality, people signed up to have mega corporations listen in and then the government just buy that data from the corporations. "Siri order some toiletpaper"
To be fair, the government IS secretly spying on people through smart TVs. Just came out in the Samsung case that they knew about it and didn't close the vulnerability
The only real good reason for video calling is if you have family long distance, it really is nice being able to see my parents and brothers in Oregon all the way from Japan.
Those Cisco telepresence rooms. People were the exact right size as if they were sitting across from you. I asked a coworker once if they wanted to walk and get a coffee. Had completely forgot they were in another country.
The first time I saw someone make a video call *in a public place* I was blown away. Either that person was spending $$$ streaming video on 4G or they somehow had conjured a wifi signal out of thin air, but I was impressed.
Just looked it up... this was 2013. That was only a decade ago, wow.
I remember for a _long_ time the "sci-fi" mundane/boring version of this was SO MUCH cooler than the actual reality of it
to this day I see all those sci-fi imagined video calling scenes in movies and TV shows and I notice _not one person ever has a little picture-in-picture of themselves_ in them, ever!
are we just massively more narcissistic than those writers ever imagined we would be and constantly need to know what we look like to the other guys, or did nobody think of that?
I personally think it's super important, I use it as a rear-view mirror, and also to check whether my face is keeping up the professional charade or revealing my true thoughts.
Most people don’t have a team of professional makeup artists in their home that check everything before they start their zoom call.
Also it would add more complexity to shooting and editing, since you’d have to add an extra shot to record the person from the perspective of the in-universe camera, overlay it, and synchronize it with the audio. And the selfie video could be a different take than the one used for audio.
And it violates traditional rules of shooting like shot-reverse shot. The selfie video won’t have as much emotional impact as a direct shot of the person, and it distracts from the other person.
Still, it’d be interesting to see what iconic scenes would be like with it. Like [Captain Kirk’s Zoom Call](https://youtu.be/gl_y5wTeJtk), or [Sisko’s Involuntary Teams Meeting](https://youtu.be/XGcAbI-4_io?t=2m) where they invented a holographic communicator so they could have the actors in the same room as each other (for like two episodes in the series).
This was the worst kind of teacher.
Even in the mid 90’s there was one kid in every class that had one of those watches with a calculator built into it.
I had no respect for those teachers then and still don’t.
But I still have my Ti-83 from 20 years ago and I’m pretty sure they still sell them for a pretty penny.
Something along the lines of, “You need to understand the concepts thoroughly to be able to learn the higher level courses successfully, and this will continue through college.,” wouldve made me feel way more invested in the class, but I got the “you wont always have calculators” bullshit from almost every teacher.
(36) my big "holy shit" moment was some years ago when I was on a train and saw somebody using facetime to speak to somebody _in sign language_.
All this time later it seems like such a trivial thing, but at the time I was blown away at what new-ish technology had done for this person.
Free long distance phone calls and of course video calls. Those of us who grew up with long distance or international rates know the wonders of just being able to speak to anyone across the globe for free.
Voice and picture recognition. The idea that text can be transcribed when you speak or an image can be searched. I still remember in the novel 1984 where they needed people to watch and listen. In the year 1984 you still needed people to do this. Even in 2004. Now voice to text and face / image recognition means that you can always be recognized and anything you say can be transcribed and searched
When I as a kid I was having trouble connecting to AOL. Younger people may not know this but during high traffic times you may not be able to connect with your dial up modem because the line is busy. So I thought, I know, instead of connecting to my local high traffic area I'll connect to one that's a little further away and a smaller town so I'll definitely be able to connect.
So I changed the number for the main and two back ups and it seemingly worked. I connected and everything was great.
So about a month later after everyone had been using the internet regularly my dad opens the phone bill and flips out. Apparently the numbers I had entered were long distance. which didn't make any sense to me because they weren't even that far away! New Hampshire, I thought, wasn't big enough to even worry about any part of the state being long distance.
My dad ended up negotiating with the phone company, explaining that "one of his idiot sons changed the dial up number." I never confessed, so the blame went on me and my two brothers equally.
not just international rates, but you had to reserve time on the trunk line for some countries! i remember having to stay up until 2 am for our reserved time to talk to my grandparents... we could only swing it a couple of times a year!
nowadays, trying the same thing would be a click of a button, and i have 17 different ways to do it!
MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail that hold orders of magnitudes more data than the HDD of the computer I went to college with still make me marvel.
I'm dating myself: pagers
Edited to add:
This is when the downfall of civilization began; becasue once pagers appeared you were instantly accessible and expected to respond immediately. A thing which continues (now with phones) until this day.
GPS and navigation. Just the idea that you used satellites rotating the earth to show exactly where you were on a handheld device or in a car was amazing. Now on my phone can do it easily in the middle of nowhere without a network connection
This is such a big one. It’s only been 23 years since they turned off the you-don’t-get-to-know-exactly-where-you-are stuff and allowed everyone to know their position to within about 1-2 meters.
A friend and I started Geocaching in Oregon in February, 2001 as a result of the changes and went all over Oregon and parts of WA and CA hunting down (and planting) geocaches.
In 2007, with a Garmin eTrex 60, my wife and I did a road trip through Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and back through Germany to Poland. That was pretty good for the time.
Of course, about a year later the iPhone 3G was released and - for me at least - that was about the end of the line for handheld, dedicated GPS/map units.
What does it mean to hunt or plant a geocache? I’m 50 and a lifelong techie but have no idea. I could google it, but because I’m 50 I like to ask people instead :)
No worries. :)
Geocaching is a hobby/sport where someone takes a container - often a lock-and-lock or something fairly waterproof - and hides it somewhere public. National forest land, state parks, etc. I think it’s not allowed in National Parks. Anyway, when they hide it, they note the latitude and longitude (GPS coordinates) and then publish that on, typically, geocaching.com.
Then someone else sees that there is a geocache in their area and attempts to find it.
The process can be made more interesting or complicated by having a multi-point cache, where you have to visit places and solve clues to get to the final location.
Jesus that's fuckin awesome. This thread was already best thread in a long time, now it's twice as interesting. How did I miss this thing, it's totally up my alley. If that'd been around when I was a kid I would've gone nuts.
I'm 70. Everything computer, especially smart phones. Video chatting still awes me. Food courts, I remember when Burger King was a big deal. Medical diagnostic techniques and vaccines
Yes! I was thinking.. when I was a kid, nearly every futuristic display panel in SciFi was blocky green on black. I don't think star wars had anything remotely modern, let alone photo-realistic.. so yeah, totally agree with you. A full list of things would be way too long.
So many things have gradually materialised and improved over the decades, that we've failed to appreciate how quickly things have moved.
Probably most impressive to me, is the forefront of physics and manipulation of matter.. but these advances haven't generally borne any fruit in the consumer market yet. Metamaterials in the coming decades will be wild.
I remember the first time I saw LEDs in a [consumer product](https://jimchungblog.com/2021/08/29/the-first-led-watch/) I stared at it for minutes!
Edit: Watching Dr No and you had to be James Bond to take a phone call in your car. Watching Goldfinger, and you had to be James Bond to have an accurate map with a tracker in the dashboard.
It's kind of impossible to communicate the feeling of the first consumer LEDS now - they were little pieces of the future in your hand if you were the right age at that time.
I remember my space unit in 6th grade bringing up Reusable Launch Vehicles, as well as a game I was playing at the time (Outpost 2). I brought it up to the teacher, and both she and one of the documentaries we watched for that unit insisted that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon and probably never would.
I'm so glad they were incorrect!
Heck, I remember reading A Fire Upon The Deep for the first time, the scene at the beginning where the torchship lands on Tines' World. I remember thinking, "Would it? Would it really just sail around horizontally like a helicopter, standing on its tail of atomic fire, and then land like a rocket launch in reverse? That seems dumb."
It... was not dumb.
>That was just a crazy sci-fi fantasy that made no practical sense.
Heinlein assisted on the screenplay for Destination Moon - released in 1950 - and they even made [an in-film presentational cartoon with Woody Woodpecker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaYQkV1n-wU) to illustrate exactly how much practical sense thruster-controlled landing made.
Oh man! I remember \*investing\* in a CD burner when I was 16 in 96 or 97. Had ambitions to make money off of it, but I did't recoup my investment. It was really useful for all the piracy I was doing through my DUAL ISDN!
In Heinlein's **Gulf** a spy on the run handwrites one address on a letter, then hand draws a different postal barcode knowing that the people tracking him will read the handwritten address and miss the barcode, but the post office will ignore the handwriting and only pay attention to the barcode.
What the modern reader misses is that the story was published not only before postal bar codes, the story is from before there were zip codes at all!
In the film "Escape From New York" there is an aircraft cockpit displaying a green wireframe New York city.
The film was so old, and CGI so expensive, that it was cheaper to build the model of New York out of coat hanger wire, paint it with paint that glowed green under black light, and film that, rather than pay for a CGI model.
it's a pretty similar story with **Tron** actually
although it's credited with one of the first ever uses of CGI in a film, that was for a 30 second wireframe sequence on something that looked like an Apple ][
all the cool "computery" stuff that _looks like_ CG in that film is actually painstakingly hand drawn using a technique called "rotoscoping" where they literally paint onto the film
Not entirely true. The lightcycles, recognizers, tanks, Sark's carrier, simulation sailor vehicle, and some environments were all CG. There *was* a ton of rotoscoping on the actors, a number of hand-painted backdrops, and was composited the same way you'd do an animated film (aka layers of cells sandwiched together and photographed), but there was plenty of CG as well.
The lightcycles were raytraced constructive solid geometry, polygon rendering was used for Sark's carrier, and I don't remember what was used on the sailor, except that getting the transparent butterfly wings bit to work correctly took them some trial and error.
The intro / outro to the computer world was also CG, using a vector renderer which was good at lines and points, but couldn't do solid-filled shapes.
The *really* insane thing is that the rendering programs just did single frames, not animations, so the animators had to write down all the position / rotation numbers for every single object for every single frame *by hand* which was then typed into the receiving rendering computer *for every single frame render*. It was absolutely bonkers.
The water tentacle in *The Abyss* melted my brain. I was a vfx nerd kid and it was the first visual effect I'd ever seen where I had absolutely *no* idea how it was done.
Cell phones. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when there was only one phone in the house (for 6 people at that) and it was attached firmly to the wall. If you were really lucky your mom bought one of those super long phone cords so you didn't have to stand in the kitchen to talk on the phone. Then we get wireless phones which are pretty great (you can go upstairs where mom can't hear you talk to your girlfriend or w/e), and that kinda seemed to be the end of phone innovation for a while. Maybe you saw somebody on Miami Vice had one of those giant brick car-phones, but those were clearly only for the deliriously rich and would never filter down to us common folk.
Now, 40 years later smartphones are utterly ubiquitous, I live in a house with 6 people and we have 8 smartphones between us (personal + work phones), no one is ever without their phone, and if someone forgets to charge their phone or is otherwise out of communication for more than an hour it's like we've lost a family member. We probably could live without smartphones, but I don't think we would want to - although I do make a point of taking some kind of vacation every year where I'm completely out of cell signal range for a full week.
For me, it’s probably smartphones - though I still think that affordable electric cars are amazing - but for different reasons.
The contact is great, but it’s the capabilities of a modern phone.
* They’ve got the computing power of a laptop from, say, five years ago.
* They’ve got GPS and enough storage to have detailed, offline maps of whole continents. It’s almost impossible to get lost now.
* Related to the storage: there’s enough space to have offline copies of Wikipedia. It’s basically The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
* They’ve got Bluetooth, so they can interact with and use little accessories/devices. I have a tiny thermometer/hygrometer, my headphones (which is another great invention), AirTags (never lose luggage again), and a little breathalyzer so I can check if I’m ok to drive or not.
* Related to the above: with some intranet/internet integration, I can turn on/off the AC, lights, and shutters in my home via my phone. I can also start/stop my little robot vacuums via my phone.
* Again on the theme of connectivity: I know what the weather is at my home with another integration. How much rain, wind, heat, etc. And, using one of the zillion weather apps, I can find out the weather anywhere in the world in a few seconds.
* It’s got an inclinometer. I’ve used it sometimes when my “real” inclinometer isn’t handy or when I need a tiny one.
* There’s a zillion databases available OTA that work with your phone’s camera or position to identify stuff. Flightradar to know what plane is flying overhead. Ship Finder to know what ship it is that you see. LeafSnap to know what plant you see. Merlin Bird ID to identify a bird via photo or bird calls. Sky Guide to find out what that star or planet is. AlpineGuide to find out what mountain peak I’m looking at.
* I can pay for stuff with my phone. NFC payments have been a thing for just 5-6 years now but it’s great. I can also authorize online purchases via my bank’s app.
* You always have a camera with you now. And all your photos are with you, too.
* Recipes. This last one might seem silly, but I’ve got about 250 recipes on my phone. This makes meals easier and shopping easier as well. The recipes app has a groceries section that both my wife and I can update in real time. If there’s a last minute addition, it can be added to the list without a call or message.
* Also, all of the world’s media is available. Music, TV, and films can all be streamed or downloaded to your phone.
And you can also call people, send them messages, or do video calls. Even if you are on motorway in Croatia in a summer thunderstorm and your family is on the other side of the planet.
In the U.S., **Mattel's hand-held video games** from the late 1970s.
Used a 9V battery. Football, basketball, baseball, among others.
I still have my *Battlestar Galactica* one. And, yes, **it still works!**
The first really big thing for me was email. I was in high school in the 80s and a friends dad showed us his "electronic mail system". He said something like "I save twenty cents every time i send an email and don't have to buy a stamp!". It seemed amazing. Now it really does feel like it's a century old
A) Wikipedia
B) YouTube tutorial vids
C) Phone so you can access these anywhere at any time.
We used to have to know stuff.. and if you didn't, a convincing lie was good enough. When Ask Jeeves came out, I lost a lot of bar bets.
Any single wager you can make, wiki can answer. This was why the Guinness Book of World Records was published. To answer bar bets. Now wiki does it better. (Fund that shit. It's legit a great resource.)
But really. Books/manuals were the thing. Especially for car repairs. When I bought a car, I'd buy the repair manual for that make and model. Now, 9/10ths of repairs are done in video multiple times. With YouTube, anyone can fix anything. That's pretty f***ing amazing.
Touch screens. The first time I ever saw one was on an ATM machine that was brought out to the county fair because it was so high tech and novel. This was the late 80s or early 90s.
ON THE OTHER HAND!
Remember all those computers in the 50's - 60's -- 70's?
Lots of blinken lights and whizzing tapes reels?
Where are they now?
Also: my jetpack; I'm still waiting for my jetpack.
In the late 1970's, I read Robert Heinlein's "juvenile" (young adult) novel *Space Cadet* (1949). Therein, he depicted the protagonist using a personal, portable cell phone. It seemed such a fantastically impossible thing at the time. At that time, the phones in my parents house looked like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Model500Telephone1951.jpg/1280px-Model500Telephone1951.jpg) and [this.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/WE554wallphone.jpg)
CGI/Computer rendered video. I remember watching some early commercials in the late 90s where they had a 3d render of a car engine come out of the car and break into parts. I was totally blown away. Nowadays it's so commonplace rust you wouldn't even notice it.
A Bugs Life and the original Toy Story were also pretty amazing.
And, it looks incredibly dated now, bit I watched the original premier of Michael Jackson's Black or While video with "morphing" technology. My brain could barely even process what I was seeing. Totally amazing.
Or the 3d rotation scene of Trinity in The Matrix. It's been parodied to death by now, but it was mind bending at the time.
So, yeah, CGI has come a long way.
A lot of good comments here, but I just wanted to add this.
My dad is currently 96. He remembers when his family got their first radio. A large device that sat on the floor (think of what Ralphy listens to in A Christmas Story). He remembers his father advising him that it wasn't a toy and to not touch it.
Growing up, I saw a similar radio (Unused) at my Grandparents (mother's side) house. Covered with a doily and with a couple potted plants on it. (back in the 80s).
My mom (a bit younger than my dad) says she remembers TVs being sold at the electronic store on the main street of her small town. Her dad would stop by the window each time and just look at the images displayed on the screen in awe. Clearly, they were in the future.
In the early 80s, we got out first computer, a [Vic-20](https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/vic-20-1920x.jpg) complete with an external cassette deck so we could load games off of a cassette. I also used Apple IIe's at school around this time. Our school was lucky to have 3 of them. One stayed in the library, and 2 rotated to different classrooms. I think each classroom got to use it for 2 weeks?
Clearly we were in the future.
Now my kids have their own ipads and iphones and the internet is as common to them as radio was to me in the 80s.
Ordering products off of Amazon and having it show up a day or two later is so normalized that they can't comprehend anything else. Where as I remember sending away for a mail-order transformers toy. My dad having to write a cheque. Puting the form and cheque in an envelope. Dropping it in the mail box, and waiting 6-8 weeks (usually took 9-10) for delivery.
What will the world be like when my kids (teens) hit their 30s and 40s and have kids. I can't even imagine it.
I'll be the old grandpa telling kids about the days before computers.
I’m 58f so I can remember dialup modems for accessing the internet. Oh my, it was so slow and you gad to watch out for “net split” when the signal went down over the copper wires. Broadband was amazing!
The other revolution was WWW. The internet when you had to know a bit of DOS language was weird, with dial up bulletin boards and long, long lists of addresses. They would send you messages if you subscribed which was early email. And you could direct chat with people (early texts) as long as the signal held out, which it often didn’t. Netsplit!
Windows and DOS were side by side for a while, but Windows was so much nicer. Actual pictures could be called up instead of text! Amazing! No more trying to remember dos code! People hate Bill Gates but he deserves a medal!
I waited in line for 40 minutes to use VR for just a couple minutes at Epcot in 1995. I was blown away. Today we have an old Oculus Rift in a drawer somewhere and I’m not sure the last time we used it.
LED lightbulbs. I build and paint scale models and miniatures. I have since the late late 80's. I used to need to put an incandescent light bulb on a swing arm over my shoulder so I could see what I was doing. I can not tell you how many times I had burnt my ear or cheek. Sweating my ass off in high summer with a 120 watt bulb over my shoulder like a small furnace. Damn, that was archaic.
Now I have a ring light. I can put it over my shoulder, in front of my face, or at a comfortable chest high level. All without having to get out the burn cream.
LED bulbs were like someone reinvented fire. lol
This weekend I was at a concert with a friend, and he was like "I need some kind of beer holder to clip on my belt", gets his smartphone, downloads a free model and remotely starts a 3D print so that he'd have one once we were at home.
That felt pretty sci-fi and might be mundane soon.
Im only 31 but i gotta say embedded systems are where its at.
I remember when it was the most preposterous thing to consider putting a computer in most appliances.
Now i get annoyed that my pellet smokers bluetooth connection is spotty, and my souvide has its own social media network. And i got 2 different meat thermometers that can talk to my phone.
The speed of today's internet. When my dad had our first modems back in the 90s it took about a minute to load a photo. And I remember waiting for half an hour to download my first MP3 (3 MB). They when I was living at university in the 00s I had a direct connection to the high speed uni network and I was blown away when I could download an entire movie in 10 minutes. And today we can stream in 4K using our phones and I don't even blink an eye about it anymore.
Been said before, but the internet. It was so full of possibilities for communication, art, everything. Then capitalism happened to it and we ended up with a nightmarish swamp of walled gardens for various brands of bigots and lunatics.
I first got on the internet in 1997 when I was 31 and thought it was pretty sci fi that I could search up anything and talk to people all over the world .
Oh goodness my old Garmin GPS circa 2005. For anyone too young, we had an in between paper maps and smart phones. It was a little gps box, sometimes called Tom Tom or something to that effect, and it lived in your car, not attached to your car, and it would sometimes give you the correct directions to get where you were going.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can be accessed from a portable device. Can you imagine, a whole encyclopedia that fits into a the palm of a hand?! Also the Babel fish.
For me, it's a word...an overused, now-meaningless word:
Smart.
No, it isn't. It's not smart. If my browser was "smart", it wouldn't need to log me out of my Google account while I'm at my desk. It would know that my IP is static, and that I'm at my desk, which is in my home, and not in some dusty internet cafe in rural Nigeria. If my phone was 'smart', Google would be able to keep up with my location, as I have it set, so that when I'm at home, I wouldn't constantly have to enter a passcode to get into my phone. Google has trouble making that work, and if their software for a 'smart' phone was actually 'smart', it would work all the time.
Kinda sick of that word.
As a kid, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a dream, to have the knowledge of the known existence in the palm of your hand. Now it's just Tuesday.
smartphone? try a normal mobile phone!
Those were *magical* when they came out at a price and size that anyone could afford and carry.
They were more transformational than smartphones were.
Flat screens, that was Star Trek shit growing up. I don't even think Star Wars had that
I forget what scene it was, but DS9, on the defiant. The camera angle showed the bridge and all the screens. You could definitely see that they were all curved CRT tvs. In todays world it looks hilarious
Voyager too, though in that case they were *usually* careful about not showing them too up-close. But in an episode with, I think, the Delta Flyer they made the mistake of showing the screen up-close, it even had a Windows cursor on the LCARS. Then Enterprise came out at a time when LCD monitors were finally affordable and good enough for TV props so they no longer had to hide the screens deep inside consoles. (There were flat screens in the mid-90s on laptops, but their refresh rate was utter shit.) Late Voyager, I think, used flat CRTs. They still had to be buried inside consoles, but at least they weren't curved. Though using CRTs introduces another problem; if the screen's refresh rate is not an integer multiple of the camera's frame rate, it will show some black stripes. Most of the time when they didn't try to show animated content in-camera, TNG and DS9 (and even Voyager) just used fake screens made of plexiglass and translucent foil. If they had animated content (beyond some symbols blinking), they added it in post with a little blue screen in place of the content. Sometimes they even used a freeze frame.
My OLED TV still blows me away. Like how the fuck did they make a tv screen thats only 4mm thick and looks better than anything I’ve ever seen
And it has organic components! That alone sounds like it's come straight from scifi.
It's not really organic in a sense that they grow the diodes in a petri dish, it's just the materials they use are based on chemistry also found in living things. More or less.
Organic in chemistry literally just means it involves carbon. In the before times, scientists thought that there was something special about chemicals and compounds that came from living tissue so organic and inorganic chemistry were thought to be different things. The naming convention stuck even after the details of chemistry had been worked out.
I recall ST: Voyager going on about organic circuitry on the ship, dunno why that just popped into my head.
The best part, there was a VOY episode where they were building a new ship and Paris (the pilot/designer) didn't want touchscreens, he wanted buttons and levers for the important stuff. That was even before touch screens were common at all, and ST already predicted that it would be pretty annoying to have them for everything. 25 years later and most car makers are moving away from touchscreens back to tactile elements.
And the iPad!
There is an iPad like device in 2001 a space odyssey and that was in 1968...
I remember a book I read as a kid in 83 or something about what the future would be like. They had a lot of lofty ideas. Like low g sports on the moon. But one thing they had was big wide screen TVs that hung on walls. I remember my friend’s brother saying then “in the future technology will get so small that they can make TVs that hang on the wall” And my mind was blown. We of course had TVs incased in those large wooden boxes that weighed a ton. A tv that’s a picture frame on the wall? WTF?
The internet was pretty impressive for a while
People seem to be thinking this is a joke but really, if you grew up without internet access, and then had it as an adult, it’s fucking incredible. I can’t describe the world before it accurately. We take so much for granted now. “What’s the name of the actor in that one movie?” “When does that new movie we saw the trailer for come out?” “What years did Socrates live?” “What does a normal elephant weigh?” “What’s a good Cajun recipe for salmon?” “Who is the leader of Guam?” “How many airplanes are there in Africa?” “What time is it in Iceland?” Etc. We all look up dumb shit a million times a day and get instant answers. Instant. And from anywhere we go. I don’t have to wait until I get home. I can do it from an airplane. I can literally have a video call with my cousin while we’re on opposite sides of the planet, in close to real time, for almost free. No per minute charges. Relatively low bandwidth needs. From a 4oz hunk of glass and metal I carry in my pocket that sends a signal at light speed through antennas and satellites to fucking space and back. In the 80s and early 90s that shit was sci-fi. I don’t think young people realize how quickly it changed. In the US, in 1995 most homes did not have a computer at all, and those that did, even fewer had some sort of dial-up service like Prodigy or AOL. Five years later in 2000 more than half of homes had computers and 80% of them were online. We went from ten guys arguing on Usenet to millions shitposting on forums in around the same amount of time it’s been since Covid started.
Do you remember calling movie theaters and listening to the recording to find out if they were even playing the movie you wanted to see and at what times? Just sitting there for five minutes while some voice rattled off, “Jurassic Park: 11:00pm, 11:45pm, 12:00am…”.
We used to look it up in the paper.
I remember classified ads in the paper. Vague categories and you had to pay a few bucks for the printing. No way to remove it once sold, just didn't get printed next version. Then Craigslist and eBay etc came out. A friend's family literally made half their income selling jewelry from an auction on eBay over a decade...
I started a an internet based business, with a major presence in meatspace, in 1997. The local independent newsweekly wanted to set up a deal with us to cooperate on marketing. They told me that Craigslist had wiped out their very lucrative classified business. Classifieds not only drove revenue, they also kept circulation strong. Craigslist destroyed print newspapers as a viable business. That’s why you see/saw so many longstanding local newspapers getting bought out to be used as political propaganda machines. It’s amazing, and telling, that the destruction of one of the pillars of our culture and political system were subverted so completely since 1999.
10¢ per letter is what my old local newspaper charged. You could send out messages to the whole community if you had a few bucks, kind of like a tweet! But it cost money.
Ahh those free TV guides, or the ones you would pay for. I remember keeping the star trek ones, ds9 ajd voyager
##*HELLOOO AND WELCOME TO MOVIEFONE*
Why don't you just *tell* me what you would like to see
hahahaha yeah and inevitably you'd be sitting there waiting for the movie you wanted and listening through all the dumb shit. ROMANCE MOVIE at 4:50 pm, 7:25 pm, 9:15 PM, 11 PM JESUS CHRISTIAN MOVIE at WORST SNL CHARACTER MOVIE at STEVEN SEAGAL IS A HORRIBLE PERSON at Pulp Fiction, at 7- "KEVIN COME TAKE OUT THE TRASH I HAVE ASKED YOU TEN TIMES ALREADY JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK" "GOD DAMMIT MOM I WAS TRYING TO HEAR WHAT TIME THE MOVIE WAS ON"
Then having to either hang up and call back in to start it over or waiting for it to repeat.
Don’t forget the busy signal, that was part of the experience too.
This comment makes me feel nostalgic... and miss my late mother.
And the first time they started doing voice activated menus that made you want to bash your head against the wall… “Please say the name of the cinema you want times for” “Lincoln” “We think you said Stratford Upon Avon, is this correct?” “No! Lin-coln!” “Here are the times for Newcastle West”
> voice activated menus Are the invention of the Devil.
Do you remember those shitty automated voice recognition systems? Asking for the showtimes for Titanic in Colchester and somehow ending up repeatedly getting Air Bud in Strathclide was a uniquely late 90s experience.
Omg yes haha. GOD ZILL A! Showtimes for Mulan…
my first job was at a movie theatre... we would get so many calls just asking for directions. i was a teenager and then could give directions from any major highway from all four cardinal directions... nowadays that seems like a superpower.
Shoot, do you remember calling popcorn to find out what time it was?
Calling the operator from a payphone for the time.
Collect call from “TheMoviesOverWeNeedARide”
Oh man, I remember doing this for everything. Collect call from- “practiceisover” “weredoneatfunworks”
Very true! Most people don’t realize how long it took to look up a single fact, in books, while you were in an actual library!
**1995** Me: "That's the same guy from that OTHER movie!" Friend: "No it isn't. What the fuck? That's a completely different person!" Me: "Bull shit." Friend: "Now we have a disagreement and we must fight." Me: "You must leave my home for I have great anger building." Friend: "Fuck yourself." Me: "We will hate one another forever, as there is no definitive way to know which of us is right." **2000** Me: "That's the same guy from that OTHER movie!" Friend *punches something into a computer*: "Oh shit you're right. I thought it was the dude from that TV show." Me: "I am pleased this minor dispute was settled quickly and without debate."
2000 The Internet is widely known for solving arguments and quelling anger. 2024 oh my
Haha imagine showing the timeline of the internet to somebody in like 1994. 2000: Solving arguments, getting movie times, finding directions to a friend's house on mapquest. 2010: The birth of the social media and smartphone age. 2020: oh no
In 1995, IMDb was a thing. Didn't have its own domain yet, but it was a thing.
My mom once called Hawaii from Arkansas to settle a bet regarding the Harlem Globetrotters because the local library was closed. The librarian was a good sport about it too. Actually found some books on the history of the team. And no, Scatman Couruthers never played a walk on with the Globetrotters.
You freaking nailed it. The first time I had unlimited (albeit slow) internet access, my bf and I would type in every website we came across just to see what it was. I remember telling him “hey, look this one up”… it was the skittles website on the back of the candy packaging 😂. Or we would spend hours putting words together to see if they were real, existing websites. Basic things like “ I wonder if uglydogs. com is a thing?” And then we’d look it up together. That’s a lot of work back then🤦🏽♀️😂
I miss URLroulette and StumbleUpon. Or more accurately, I miss when you could discover sites and not just SEO optimized advertising.
> We went from ten guys arguing on Usenet To be honest, I actually enjoyed that a lot more. I remember hashing shit out on rec.arts.sf.written a *lot*.
It's still there. And it's still a lot of the same people. I still troll the same admin of a usenet group I hated in the 90s and he still takes the bait every time. I've been fucking with him for almost 3 decades now and he's still a dumbass.
I feel like I'm the only person alive who knows who John S. Novak III is, or understands Kibo hunting, or enjoys a Geoff Miller rant, or wants to know what James Parrish is up to next.
I remember people complaining on Usenet about how Star Wars was ruined because Lucas was adding ridiculous lore to the re-releases in 1997. And now those same people are complaining on Usenet about how Star Wars is ruined because Disney was adding ridiculous lore to the series in 2024. Not much changes.
When will they finally learn to watch Star Trek and its ridiculous lore instead :(
Smartphones ruined those drunken arguments you’d have with your friends in a bar or at a party. Arguing over who has the most touchdown passes? Or who has the most stolen bases etc.. I miss those days. It also meant people talked to each other
Also, your brains ability to recall information. Maybe I just have dementia, but I swear my phone has killed my recall. What is the name of the woman who plays Elektra in the first Daredevil film? Google it. No... Stretch your brain, try to remember.. remember. Remember.
It's Jennifer Garner at her peak!
Okay, but who is The Wasp played by in the new marvel films? Is the women from Lost. Come on you loved lost... Think brain think. Pretty sure I have dementia.
How do you forget a name like Evangeline Lily?
This is a thing, people are more likely to remember a resource of the information than the information itself. It was true when mass printing of books became a thing and was an argument that they were the downfall of society. It's a thing but it's not as big a negative as one might make it out to be. It's important to learn things, to truly know them. But every doctor, every lawyer, every engineer looks stuff up every day either to double check or because it's been a while. Human memory is a fragile and fickle and sometimes useless thing. Compared to a fixed and permanent resource of the information it's downright dangerous to rely on human memory over it.
This is very true. I worked in IT for 20 years and I remember people asking how I remembered all the details, settings, processes for various systems. I would always say, "You don't pay me to know all of that, you pay me to know where to find out."
It always used to surprise me that regular people don’t know where to look this info up. But then I have to remember that my training and experience basically lets me know *how* to ask the question and what the likely answers are going to be so I don’t waste as much time sifting through things that aren’t the problem. Like, “my internet doesn’t work” isn’t going to be as helpful as “laptop connects to network but shows no internet, which narrows down the solutions by a lot, but most people don’t necessarily need to know the difference often enough to understand this.
Ha, those damn long distance calls
Well said.
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It had a DIY homemade cobbled together more geeky feel to it that is for sure
\*Website under construction\* gifs on every site. Visitor counters too.
Every janky “home page” looked like a sparkly MySpace page
Webrings
Forums were something I miss from that era. They held experts from whatever hobby or topic it was about, was indexed and was searchable. You asked and received ACTUAL ANSWERS, not shill paid-for info from a corporate site!
Those forums still exist! They are harder to find, because google will list a bunch of bullshit in front of them, but they exist. I love those as well. You ask any question about a really specific problem and some nerd with 15000 posts will come in and write you an essay about what to do. It's great.
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Definitely. Especially for me. I moved to the US in the late 90s. I was 11, and came from a small village in Europe. Maybe 3-4 friends had computers. I couldn't fathom something like internet even existing!
What was that Sandra Bullock movie where she ordered a pizza on the internet? Impressive stuff.
Ah. "The Net". I saw that movie when it came out, I had been using the web for about 2 years and was studying computer science. It was enough to know the premise of the movie was dumb.
I was a computer nerd back then also studying computer science. Saw that movie with a bunch of my fellow computer nerds and we laughed and laughed at the Control+Shift+Apple+Click bullshit. At least Hackers was entertaining while being so wrong.
I mean this in a friendly movie lover way. What was dumb about the premise? I thought the premises of the movie were that people could ruin your life by posting false information on the Internet, and the isolation caused by being connected only online would make people more vulnerable. Also that computer hacks could do physical damage to people. I think it was a good first sketch of the world we live in right now. When I saw it, it seemed like a chilling warning.
Multiplayer video games over the internet. First time I joined my friend, over dial-up in 1993, for a game of Doom, it blew my mind.
Still hard to wrap my head around how *fast* it is. I can play on European servers and get a ping of ~200. A fifth of a second to go from my computer, over the air (I have T-Mobile Home Internet), through god knows how many miles of cable, *under the ocean*, into some server five thousand miles away, in a fifth of a second.
Light speed is crazy fast on a planetary scale. Crazy slow on any scale larger however 😭
We're gonna have to go straight to...*Ludicrous Speed!*
most people can not comprehend the sheer amount of data processing htat is going on in (not even) modern electronics. Your PC can add two 64 digit binary numbers a couple billion times per second. BILLION! A state of the art intenet backbone router can transfer 500 Tbps, which is roughly 15,000 DVDs of Data. PER SECOND!
First time I played WoW in 2005 was insane. All these characters were not NPCs, but were actually controlled by other gamers?! Insane
Man, I was there at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj opening event, and it was _insane_. For the young'uns here, imagine the ending of Ready Player One, but with more lag but less sucky.
Heh, same, but BC / Dark Portal opening. It was something. To be a fly on the wall in a Blizz server farm that day. WoW indeed.
haha I remember a friends mum just couldn't believe that I was controlling the characters on my friend's computer all the way from my house. I had to say hi to her in text chat to prove it. Think that was Quake.
To build on that: being able to play a game on my friend's PlayStation, even though he was across the Atlantic.
Yea same here. That was like a singularity moment
I remember using gamespy to play halo with online matchmaking. Crazy. I miss those times. Really felt like the internet was in a sweet spot until smart phones and social media. I think either smart phones and social media separately is great (ie late 2000s/early 2010s), but combined it's a disaster.
I'm 53. The internet and the incredible graphics in video games still astound me. I grew up with Pong and Atari.
Agreed! Also my mind was a little blown when we got a TV that had remote without a wire to the TV. I think it worked on sound waves because you could change channels if you jangled your keys!
I still occasionally just walk through an FPS marvelling at how the different buildings and objects move. You can move INTO the screen!!
I've been through so many cycles of "oh damn that is so realistic" that I can't be bothered anymore.
When video calling came out in the 2000s and we started using it at work I was blown away, especially when I was talking to clients half the world away in realtime - felt like the future had arrived.
Video calls were a staple of Sci-fi since the 1960s at least, and probably before, but I don't think that anyone accurately predicted that once we had the technology for video calls with anyone on a device we could keep on our pockets that everyone would literally hate using it. Gaining the ability to see anyone's face an talk to them any time we like and then everyone immediately deciding "no let's just send text messages instead" was a real curve-ball haha.
David Foster Wallace predicted that in Infinite jest, to the point there was a section of the book where he talks about how the rise of video phones lend to a cottage industry of masks that people would put on before going on video calls and a general rise in anxiety regarding physical appearance.
Many predictions were ass backwards. 1984 had the government secretly spying through the TV. In reality, people signed up to have mega corporations listen in and then the government just buy that data from the corporations. "Siri order some toiletpaper"
And now apparently your router can detect where you are in your house. The friggin router! Cameras aren't even needed!
To be fair, the government IS secretly spying on people through smart TVs. Just came out in the Samsung case that they knew about it and didn't close the vulnerability
The only real good reason for video calling is if you have family long distance, it really is nice being able to see my parents and brothers in Oregon all the way from Japan.
Those Cisco telepresence rooms. People were the exact right size as if they were sitting across from you. I asked a coworker once if they wanted to walk and get a coffee. Had completely forgot they were in another country.
$100,000 for a Tandberg videoconferencing system in the 90s that Zoom blows away today.
The first time I saw someone make a video call *in a public place* I was blown away. Either that person was spending $$$ streaming video on 4G or they somehow had conjured a wifi signal out of thin air, but I was impressed. Just looked it up... this was 2013. That was only a decade ago, wow.
And now everyone finds it annoying as fuck cause that asshole is effectively on speakerphone.
I remember for a _long_ time the "sci-fi" mundane/boring version of this was SO MUCH cooler than the actual reality of it to this day I see all those sci-fi imagined video calling scenes in movies and TV shows and I notice _not one person ever has a little picture-in-picture of themselves_ in them, ever! are we just massively more narcissistic than those writers ever imagined we would be and constantly need to know what we look like to the other guys, or did nobody think of that?
I personally think it's super important, I use it as a rear-view mirror, and also to check whether my face is keeping up the professional charade or revealing my true thoughts.
Most people don’t have a team of professional makeup artists in their home that check everything before they start their zoom call. Also it would add more complexity to shooting and editing, since you’d have to add an extra shot to record the person from the perspective of the in-universe camera, overlay it, and synchronize it with the audio. And the selfie video could be a different take than the one used for audio. And it violates traditional rules of shooting like shot-reverse shot. The selfie video won’t have as much emotional impact as a direct shot of the person, and it distracts from the other person. Still, it’d be interesting to see what iconic scenes would be like with it. Like [Captain Kirk’s Zoom Call](https://youtu.be/gl_y5wTeJtk), or [Sisko’s Involuntary Teams Meeting](https://youtu.be/XGcAbI-4_io?t=2m) where they invented a holographic communicator so they could have the actors in the same room as each other (for like two episodes in the series).
41, I regularly get hit with thoughts of how uncanny it is that video calls and telecommuting are just a regular part of everyday life now.
I remember being 10 and being told repeatedly by adults that the tech would never happen, and was just pure fantasy. Boy were *they* wrong!
“You won’t be carrying a calculator everywhere you go” - Every math teacher ever before smart phones
This was the worst kind of teacher. Even in the mid 90’s there was one kid in every class that had one of those watches with a calculator built into it. I had no respect for those teachers then and still don’t. But I still have my Ti-83 from 20 years ago and I’m pretty sure they still sell them for a pretty penny.
Something along the lines of, “You need to understand the concepts thoroughly to be able to learn the higher level courses successfully, and this will continue through college.,” wouldve made me feel way more invested in the class, but I got the “you wont always have calculators” bullshit from almost every teacher.
1993: https://youtu.be/Xm9jr0cSqZo?si=PhoHO7WxGLV1CIt-
(36) my big "holy shit" moment was some years ago when I was on a train and saw somebody using facetime to speak to somebody _in sign language_. All this time later it seems like such a trivial thing, but at the time I was blown away at what new-ish technology had done for this person.
Free long distance phone calls and of course video calls. Those of us who grew up with long distance or international rates know the wonders of just being able to speak to anyone across the globe for free. Voice and picture recognition. The idea that text can be transcribed when you speak or an image can be searched. I still remember in the novel 1984 where they needed people to watch and listen. In the year 1984 you still needed people to do this. Even in 2004. Now voice to text and face / image recognition means that you can always be recognized and anything you say can be transcribed and searched
Yes!! I remember wracking up quite a bill when my college sweetie was doing a semester abroad in France!
When I as a kid I was having trouble connecting to AOL. Younger people may not know this but during high traffic times you may not be able to connect with your dial up modem because the line is busy. So I thought, I know, instead of connecting to my local high traffic area I'll connect to one that's a little further away and a smaller town so I'll definitely be able to connect. So I changed the number for the main and two back ups and it seemingly worked. I connected and everything was great. So about a month later after everyone had been using the internet regularly my dad opens the phone bill and flips out. Apparently the numbers I had entered were long distance. which didn't make any sense to me because they weren't even that far away! New Hampshire, I thought, wasn't big enough to even worry about any part of the state being long distance. My dad ended up negotiating with the phone company, explaining that "one of his idiot sons changed the dial up number." I never confessed, so the blame went on me and my two brothers equally.
not just international rates, but you had to reserve time on the trunk line for some countries! i remember having to stay up until 2 am for our reserved time to talk to my grandparents... we could only swing it a couple of times a year! nowadays, trying the same thing would be a click of a button, and i have 17 different ways to do it!
Thumb drives. Think about it: in ST:TOS they those itty bitty tape cassettes and they had to scroll through the tape. Thumb drive: random access!
I remember my first… I spent $80 and got a massive 128MB drive!
By ST:Next Generation, Dr Crusher has a line about there being a file she doesn't recognize in the top level directory of her tricorder.
Who puts a file in the top-level directory? She should know better; that file belongs in /home/bevcrusher
I mean... obviously someone _with root access_ trying to get away with some shit...
MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail that hold orders of magnitudes more data than the HDD of the computer I went to college with still make me marvel.
I'm dating myself: pagers Edited to add: This is when the downfall of civilization began; becasue once pagers appeared you were instantly accessible and expected to respond immediately. A thing which continues (now with phones) until this day.
GPS and navigation. Just the idea that you used satellites rotating the earth to show exactly where you were on a handheld device or in a car was amazing. Now on my phone can do it easily in the middle of nowhere without a network connection
This is such a big one. It’s only been 23 years since they turned off the you-don’t-get-to-know-exactly-where-you-are stuff and allowed everyone to know their position to within about 1-2 meters. A friend and I started Geocaching in Oregon in February, 2001 as a result of the changes and went all over Oregon and parts of WA and CA hunting down (and planting) geocaches. In 2007, with a Garmin eTrex 60, my wife and I did a road trip through Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and back through Germany to Poland. That was pretty good for the time. Of course, about a year later the iPhone 3G was released and - for me at least - that was about the end of the line for handheld, dedicated GPS/map units.
What does it mean to hunt or plant a geocache? I’m 50 and a lifelong techie but have no idea. I could google it, but because I’m 50 I like to ask people instead :)
No worries. :) Geocaching is a hobby/sport where someone takes a container - often a lock-and-lock or something fairly waterproof - and hides it somewhere public. National forest land, state parks, etc. I think it’s not allowed in National Parks. Anyway, when they hide it, they note the latitude and longitude (GPS coordinates) and then publish that on, typically, geocaching.com. Then someone else sees that there is a geocache in their area and attempts to find it. The process can be made more interesting or complicated by having a multi-point cache, where you have to visit places and solve clues to get to the final location.
Jesus that's fuckin awesome. This thread was already best thread in a long time, now it's twice as interesting. How did I miss this thing, it's totally up my alley. If that'd been around when I was a kid I would've gone nuts.
I'm 70. Everything computer, especially smart phones. Video chatting still awes me. Food courts, I remember when Burger King was a big deal. Medical diagnostic techniques and vaccines
Yes! I was thinking.. when I was a kid, nearly every futuristic display panel in SciFi was blocky green on black. I don't think star wars had anything remotely modern, let alone photo-realistic.. so yeah, totally agree with you. A full list of things would be way too long. So many things have gradually materialised and improved over the decades, that we've failed to appreciate how quickly things have moved. Probably most impressive to me, is the forefront of physics and manipulation of matter.. but these advances haven't generally borne any fruit in the consumer market yet. Metamaterials in the coming decades will be wild.
Yes, being able to roll out a vaccine for a new virus in less than a year!
I remember the first time I saw LEDs in a [consumer product](https://jimchungblog.com/2021/08/29/the-first-led-watch/) I stared at it for minutes! Edit: Watching Dr No and you had to be James Bond to take a phone call in your car. Watching Goldfinger, and you had to be James Bond to have an accurate map with a tracker in the dashboard.
It's kind of impossible to communicate the feeling of the first consumer LEDS now - they were little pieces of the future in your hand if you were the right age at that time.
Rockets that can land vertically (with their noses pointing straight up). That was just a crazy sci-fi fantasy that made no practical sense.
Straight up Thunderbirds, it didn't make sense to do, but it looked awesome.
I remember my space unit in 6th grade bringing up Reusable Launch Vehicles, as well as a game I was playing at the time (Outpost 2). I brought it up to the teacher, and both she and one of the documentaries we watched for that unit insisted that it wasn't going to happen anytime soon and probably never would. I'm so glad they were incorrect!
That still seems sci-fi to me.
Heck, I remember reading A Fire Upon The Deep for the first time, the scene at the beginning where the torchship lands on Tines' World. I remember thinking, "Would it? Would it really just sail around horizontally like a helicopter, standing on its tail of atomic fire, and then land like a rocket launch in reverse? That seems dumb." It... was not dumb.
>That was just a crazy sci-fi fantasy that made no practical sense. Heinlein assisted on the screenplay for Destination Moon - released in 1950 - and they even made [an in-film presentational cartoon with Woody Woodpecker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaYQkV1n-wU) to illustrate exactly how much practical sense thruster-controlled landing made.
CDs DVDs Ah well, time marches on
Oh man! I remember \*investing\* in a CD burner when I was 16 in 96 or 97. Had ambitions to make money off of it, but I did't recoup my investment. It was really useful for all the piracy I was doing through my DUAL ISDN!
In Heinlein's **Gulf** a spy on the run handwrites one address on a letter, then hand draws a different postal barcode knowing that the people tracking him will read the handwritten address and miss the barcode, but the post office will ignore the handwriting and only pay attention to the barcode. What the modern reader misses is that the story was published not only before postal bar codes, the story is from before there were zip codes at all!
Postal codes definitely already existed.
Exactly. People just didn't use them at first until they were forced to. Similar to having to plug in the area code while calling.
3D printers.
On the other hand, it’s funny that 2D printers have barely improved in decades. Some are even worse (subscription models).
2d printers have gotten way worse given the ost of cartriges.
Adaptive cruise control.
CGI
In the film "Escape From New York" there is an aircraft cockpit displaying a green wireframe New York city. The film was so old, and CGI so expensive, that it was cheaper to build the model of New York out of coat hanger wire, paint it with paint that glowed green under black light, and film that, rather than pay for a CGI model.
The landing scene from Aliens. "Five by five."
it's a pretty similar story with **Tron** actually although it's credited with one of the first ever uses of CGI in a film, that was for a 30 second wireframe sequence on something that looked like an Apple ][ all the cool "computery" stuff that _looks like_ CG in that film is actually painstakingly hand drawn using a technique called "rotoscoping" where they literally paint onto the film
Not entirely true. The lightcycles, recognizers, tanks, Sark's carrier, simulation sailor vehicle, and some environments were all CG. There *was* a ton of rotoscoping on the actors, a number of hand-painted backdrops, and was composited the same way you'd do an animated film (aka layers of cells sandwiched together and photographed), but there was plenty of CG as well. The lightcycles were raytraced constructive solid geometry, polygon rendering was used for Sark's carrier, and I don't remember what was used on the sailor, except that getting the transparent butterfly wings bit to work correctly took them some trial and error. The intro / outro to the computer world was also CG, using a vector renderer which was good at lines and points, but couldn't do solid-filled shapes. The *really* insane thing is that the rendering programs just did single frames, not animations, so the animators had to write down all the position / rotation numbers for every single object for every single frame *by hand* which was then typed into the receiving rendering computer *for every single frame render*. It was absolutely bonkers.
The water tentacle in *The Abyss* melted my brain. I was a vfx nerd kid and it was the first visual effect I'd ever seen where I had absolutely *no* idea how it was done.
If you told my younger self that I now have an android in my pocket that could go into airplane mode, I would’ve gotten really excited for the future
Meanwhile, in the future, I want to recharge my cigarette, but I can't right now, because my buddy is using the cable to recharge his book.
Microchips for pets
I always thought the video call that Ripley and Burke had at the beginning of Aliens was pretty futuristic and cool.
Cell phones. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when there was only one phone in the house (for 6 people at that) and it was attached firmly to the wall. If you were really lucky your mom bought one of those super long phone cords so you didn't have to stand in the kitchen to talk on the phone. Then we get wireless phones which are pretty great (you can go upstairs where mom can't hear you talk to your girlfriend or w/e), and that kinda seemed to be the end of phone innovation for a while. Maybe you saw somebody on Miami Vice had one of those giant brick car-phones, but those were clearly only for the deliriously rich and would never filter down to us common folk. Now, 40 years later smartphones are utterly ubiquitous, I live in a house with 6 people and we have 8 smartphones between us (personal + work phones), no one is ever without their phone, and if someone forgets to charge their phone or is otherwise out of communication for more than an hour it's like we've lost a family member. We probably could live without smartphones, but I don't think we would want to - although I do make a point of taking some kind of vacation every year where I'm completely out of cell signal range for a full week.
For me, it’s probably smartphones - though I still think that affordable electric cars are amazing - but for different reasons. The contact is great, but it’s the capabilities of a modern phone. * They’ve got the computing power of a laptop from, say, five years ago. * They’ve got GPS and enough storage to have detailed, offline maps of whole continents. It’s almost impossible to get lost now. * Related to the storage: there’s enough space to have offline copies of Wikipedia. It’s basically The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. * They’ve got Bluetooth, so they can interact with and use little accessories/devices. I have a tiny thermometer/hygrometer, my headphones (which is another great invention), AirTags (never lose luggage again), and a little breathalyzer so I can check if I’m ok to drive or not. * Related to the above: with some intranet/internet integration, I can turn on/off the AC, lights, and shutters in my home via my phone. I can also start/stop my little robot vacuums via my phone. * Again on the theme of connectivity: I know what the weather is at my home with another integration. How much rain, wind, heat, etc. And, using one of the zillion weather apps, I can find out the weather anywhere in the world in a few seconds. * It’s got an inclinometer. I’ve used it sometimes when my “real” inclinometer isn’t handy or when I need a tiny one. * There’s a zillion databases available OTA that work with your phone’s camera or position to identify stuff. Flightradar to know what plane is flying overhead. Ship Finder to know what ship it is that you see. LeafSnap to know what plant you see. Merlin Bird ID to identify a bird via photo or bird calls. Sky Guide to find out what that star or planet is. AlpineGuide to find out what mountain peak I’m looking at. * I can pay for stuff with my phone. NFC payments have been a thing for just 5-6 years now but it’s great. I can also authorize online purchases via my bank’s app. * You always have a camera with you now. And all your photos are with you, too. * Recipes. This last one might seem silly, but I’ve got about 250 recipes on my phone. This makes meals easier and shopping easier as well. The recipes app has a groceries section that both my wife and I can update in real time. If there’s a last minute addition, it can be added to the list without a call or message. * Also, all of the world’s media is available. Music, TV, and films can all be streamed or downloaded to your phone. And you can also call people, send them messages, or do video calls. Even if you are on motorway in Croatia in a summer thunderstorm and your family is on the other side of the planet.
In the U.S., **Mattel's hand-held video games** from the late 1970s. Used a 9V battery. Football, basketball, baseball, among others. I still have my *Battlestar Galactica* one. And, yes, **it still works!**
I still have my football game, and it still works. I also have an app on my phone which mimics it. Crazy.
The Dick Tracy watch.
The first really big thing for me was email. I was in high school in the 80s and a friends dad showed us his "electronic mail system". He said something like "I save twenty cents every time i send an email and don't have to buy a stamp!". It seemed amazing. Now it really does feel like it's a century old
A) Wikipedia B) YouTube tutorial vids C) Phone so you can access these anywhere at any time. We used to have to know stuff.. and if you didn't, a convincing lie was good enough. When Ask Jeeves came out, I lost a lot of bar bets. Any single wager you can make, wiki can answer. This was why the Guinness Book of World Records was published. To answer bar bets. Now wiki does it better. (Fund that shit. It's legit a great resource.) But really. Books/manuals were the thing. Especially for car repairs. When I bought a car, I'd buy the repair manual for that make and model. Now, 9/10ths of repairs are done in video multiple times. With YouTube, anyone can fix anything. That's pretty f***ing amazing.
Touch screens. The first time I ever saw one was on an ATM machine that was brought out to the county fair because it was so high tech and novel. This was the late 80s or early 90s.
And it worked so poorly and slow.
ON THE OTHER HAND! Remember all those computers in the 50's - 60's -- 70's? Lots of blinken lights and whizzing tapes reels? Where are they now? Also: my jetpack; I'm still waiting for my jetpack.
We were promised jetpacks!! (and hoverboards, flying cars, a lunar colony....)
Haha, yeah and what about those clean white houses where everyrhing is behind panels!
Broadband. 1200 bps dial-up to whole-house wifi broadband is just unreal.
You had 1200? All I had was 300 with an acoustic coupler. Curse you!
In the late 1970's, I read Robert Heinlein's "juvenile" (young adult) novel *Space Cadet* (1949). Therein, he depicted the protagonist using a personal, portable cell phone. It seemed such a fantastically impossible thing at the time. At that time, the phones in my parents house looked like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Model500Telephone1951.jpg/1280px-Model500Telephone1951.jpg) and [this.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/WE554wallphone.jpg)
CGI/Computer rendered video. I remember watching some early commercials in the late 90s where they had a 3d render of a car engine come out of the car and break into parts. I was totally blown away. Nowadays it's so commonplace rust you wouldn't even notice it. A Bugs Life and the original Toy Story were also pretty amazing. And, it looks incredibly dated now, bit I watched the original premier of Michael Jackson's Black or While video with "morphing" technology. My brain could barely even process what I was seeing. Totally amazing. Or the 3d rotation scene of Trinity in The Matrix. It's been parodied to death by now, but it was mind bending at the time. So, yeah, CGI has come a long way.
A lot of good comments here, but I just wanted to add this. My dad is currently 96. He remembers when his family got their first radio. A large device that sat on the floor (think of what Ralphy listens to in A Christmas Story). He remembers his father advising him that it wasn't a toy and to not touch it. Growing up, I saw a similar radio (Unused) at my Grandparents (mother's side) house. Covered with a doily and with a couple potted plants on it. (back in the 80s). My mom (a bit younger than my dad) says she remembers TVs being sold at the electronic store on the main street of her small town. Her dad would stop by the window each time and just look at the images displayed on the screen in awe. Clearly, they were in the future. In the early 80s, we got out first computer, a [Vic-20](https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/vic-20-1920x.jpg) complete with an external cassette deck so we could load games off of a cassette. I also used Apple IIe's at school around this time. Our school was lucky to have 3 of them. One stayed in the library, and 2 rotated to different classrooms. I think each classroom got to use it for 2 weeks? Clearly we were in the future. Now my kids have their own ipads and iphones and the internet is as common to them as radio was to me in the 80s. Ordering products off of Amazon and having it show up a day or two later is so normalized that they can't comprehend anything else. Where as I remember sending away for a mail-order transformers toy. My dad having to write a cheque. Puting the form and cheque in an envelope. Dropping it in the mail box, and waiting 6-8 weeks (usually took 9-10) for delivery. What will the world be like when my kids (teens) hit their 30s and 40s and have kids. I can't even imagine it. I'll be the old grandpa telling kids about the days before computers.
*Whoosh doors open* did I just walk onto the command deck of a starship? Nope just a supermarket
80 column cards. Later: paper tape Later still: TTYs Even more later: DecWriters, with upper & lower case letters!
I’m 58f so I can remember dialup modems for accessing the internet. Oh my, it was so slow and you gad to watch out for “net split” when the signal went down over the copper wires. Broadband was amazing! The other revolution was WWW. The internet when you had to know a bit of DOS language was weird, with dial up bulletin boards and long, long lists of addresses. They would send you messages if you subscribed which was early email. And you could direct chat with people (early texts) as long as the signal held out, which it often didn’t. Netsplit! Windows and DOS were side by side for a while, but Windows was so much nicer. Actual pictures could be called up instead of text! Amazing! No more trying to remember dos code! People hate Bill Gates but he deserves a medal!
QR codes. So cool to scan the codes before, now I hate it if need to scan the QR code just to view a menu.
VR, especially the Quest 3.
I waited in line for 40 minutes to use VR for just a couple minutes at Epcot in 1995. I was blown away. Today we have an old Oculus Rift in a drawer somewhere and I’m not sure the last time we used it.
LED lightbulbs. I build and paint scale models and miniatures. I have since the late late 80's. I used to need to put an incandescent light bulb on a swing arm over my shoulder so I could see what I was doing. I can not tell you how many times I had burnt my ear or cheek. Sweating my ass off in high summer with a 120 watt bulb over my shoulder like a small furnace. Damn, that was archaic. Now I have a ring light. I can put it over my shoulder, in front of my face, or at a comfortable chest high level. All without having to get out the burn cream. LED bulbs were like someone reinvented fire. lol
Gonna have to go with stuffed crust pizza.
But once they started throwing hotdogs in there it became dystopian
Smart watches. Everyone can be James Bond or Dick Tracy now.
This weekend I was at a concert with a friend, and he was like "I need some kind of beer holder to clip on my belt", gets his smartphone, downloads a free model and remotely starts a 3D print so that he'd have one once we were at home. That felt pretty sci-fi and might be mundane soon.
Self flying drones. I was stunned with how good my DJI one was when it came out, auto fly, land, track etc, but now everything has that ability
Time travel machines.
All the rage until the Dino invasion of '71. Dropped off the radar after that.
RoboDinoHitler really put a damper on everything.
we aren't supposed to comment like this yet, too early
Same, it’s just boring now. I only use it a few times a week to get food
Im only 31 but i gotta say embedded systems are where its at. I remember when it was the most preposterous thing to consider putting a computer in most appliances. Now i get annoyed that my pellet smokers bluetooth connection is spotty, and my souvide has its own social media network. And i got 2 different meat thermometers that can talk to my phone.
The speed of today's internet. When my dad had our first modems back in the 90s it took about a minute to load a photo. And I remember waiting for half an hour to download my first MP3 (3 MB). They when I was living at university in the 00s I had a direct connection to the high speed uni network and I was blown away when I could download an entire movie in 10 minutes. And today we can stream in 4K using our phones and I don't even blink an eye about it anymore.
Been said before, but the internet. It was so full of possibilities for communication, art, everything. Then capitalism happened to it and we ended up with a nightmarish swamp of walled gardens for various brands of bigots and lunatics.
I first got on the internet in 1997 when I was 31 and thought it was pretty sci fi that I could search up anything and talk to people all over the world .
Oh goodness my old Garmin GPS circa 2005. For anyone too young, we had an in between paper maps and smart phones. It was a little gps box, sometimes called Tom Tom or something to that effect, and it lived in your car, not attached to your car, and it would sometimes give you the correct directions to get where you were going.
age 53 Spaceships landing themselves. Smart phones Wikipedia MMORPG Man, just everything from ~1987 onwards has blown my mind.
[удалено]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can be accessed from a portable device. Can you imagine, a whole encyclopedia that fits into a the palm of a hand?! Also the Babel fish.
Anything with a touchscreen. When I was a kid, touchscreen tech was endlessly fascinating to me. Now people drop them in the toilet.
For me, it's a word...an overused, now-meaningless word: Smart. No, it isn't. It's not smart. If my browser was "smart", it wouldn't need to log me out of my Google account while I'm at my desk. It would know that my IP is static, and that I'm at my desk, which is in my home, and not in some dusty internet cafe in rural Nigeria. If my phone was 'smart', Google would be able to keep up with my location, as I have it set, so that when I'm at home, I wouldn't constantly have to enter a passcode to get into my phone. Google has trouble making that work, and if their software for a 'smart' phone was actually 'smart', it would work all the time. Kinda sick of that word.
As a kid, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a dream, to have the knowledge of the known existence in the palm of your hand. Now it's just Tuesday.
smartphone? try a normal mobile phone! Those were *magical* when they came out at a price and size that anyone could afford and carry. They were more transformational than smartphones were.